The House approved and sent to the Senate a landmark $1.1 trillion spending bill that fills in the blanks of December’s budget agreement and sets a new template for appropriations for the remainder of President Barack Obama’s second term.

Adopted 359-67, the giant measure literally touches every corner of government. And more than any single document to date, it defines the new budget reality that faces the president and his activist agenda.

The wide, bipartisan support in the House should help build momentum next in the Senate, and lawmakers are racing against a clock that requires final action by Saturday.

Until then the government will remain operating under a stopgap resolution that was again extended Wednesday. But the leadership is determined that the interim measures end there and the yearlong omnibus be put in place to ensure no more threats of shutdown.

Indeed, the ghost of past shutdowns still haunted Wednesday’s debate — together with a weariness that has seemed to infect the press coverage as well. To a surprising degree, major newspapers have largely ignored the bill with its forbidding level of detail. But it truly reflects a sea change that can’t be ignored by Obama.

The president’s health care program and Wall Street reforms will endure but with far less money than he had wanted. About $20 billion is restored for domestic programs cut under sequestration last spring. But measured in real dollars adjusted for inflation, Obama is still left with less than Congress approved six years ago for his Republican predecessor — President George W. Bush.

Liberal Democrats loudly protested but just as quickly embraced the deal, hammered out between the House and Senate Appropriations committees. Republicans faced defections on the right but nothing in the debate matched the stridency of last fall — when tea party conservatives helped to force the government shutdown in October.

“I will support the bill very reluctantly because the alternative is far worse,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who summed up the emotions of many in his party. “We are waist deep in manure, not up to our necks. Hooray!”

Exhausted from the grind of the past month, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) let slip some emotion. “This is the place where the nation found itself coming together and I can’t think of a more satisfying time I’ve had in this chamber than now,” he told his colleagues. “This bill isn’t perfect, I hate to tell you — but it is good.”

The wide margin exceeded early expectations. Republicans broke 166-64 for the bill, roughly the same as the December budget agreement. Among Democrats, it was 193-3 for the package.

The Senate debate Thursday and Friday is sure to be more contentious.

Once the papers from the House reached the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called up the measure Wednesday evening and filed a cloture motion immediately in hopes of expediting action. That cloture vote would normally occur Friday morning, but Reid said he has already requested consent that it be moved forward.

Conservatives could refuse. But given the strength of the House vote, there’s some expectation that opponents will see the handwriting on the wall and let the measure pass quickly without long delays.

Nonetheless, the relentless, often personal sparring between Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — both ironically with their own long history on the Appropriations panel — is a source of tension. And faced with a tea party challenger at home, McConnell broke with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) last month and opposed the bipartisan budget agreement that set in motion the spending bill now.

But Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, who stood with McConnell in December and serves as the ranking Republican on Appropriations, has embraced the new bill. Ever cautious, he also prides himself on his independence once he has made a commitment. And this is still a very winnable fight for him and Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) after the almost biblical 40 days and nights of negotiations behind the package.

“I wish I were as thin as I am stretched because we really worked at it,” the 4-foot-11 Marylander joked wistfully on the Senate floor this week. “This bill required very difficult choices. It meant give and take. It meant more giving on both sides, because there were no big takes.”

Indeed, the December budget deal sets very strict limits and when measured in real dollars, the bill now provides substantially less domestic spending than a very similar omnibus signed by Bush in December 2007.

Appropriations for fiscal 2014 are capped at $1.012 trillion, on top of which the bill provides $91.7 billion in overseas contingency funds — chiefly for military operations in Afghanistan but also to help the State Department address the soaring number of refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war.

These so-called OCO dollars fall within targets set in the House Republican budget resolution last spring. But the total is about $7.2 billion higher than Obama’s 2014 request, and it shows the extra latitude House Republicans will allow to win votes from GOP hawks and help the Pentagon adjust to the downward spiral now in its base funding.

On paper, the cap on nondefense spending — $491.7 billion — comes close to restoring the automatic spending cuts ordered last March under sequestration. But the number is about $2 billion less than it appears because of codicils attached to the December budget deal. As always, new crises — such as Syria or Western forest fires — also create new demands for funds.

In judging winners and losers, one standard is whether an agency’s funding gets back to what was promised by Congress last spring before sequestration took effect.

By this measure, the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation are surprising losers together with community development block grants. The Internal Revenue Service takes it on the chin: Its $11.3 billion appropriation is $503 million less than the enacted level for 2013. And inside the Energy Department, new investments in updating nuclear weapons appear to have squeezed out extra money for nonproliferation programs.

For example, an estimated $7.84 billion is provided for weapons activities within the National Nuclear Security Administration or $270 million more than the 2013 enacted level. At the same time, spending for nuclear-nonproliferation will drop to $1.95 billion or $480 million below 2013.

The Global Threat Reduction Initiative ends up with $442 million — even less than its current post-sequester level. But NNSA gets more money for its plans to upgrade and modernize an arsenal of 400 B-61 gravity bombs.

“This is a real problem because the behemoth of weapons activities is only getting larger in a tight budget environment, squeezing out nonproliferation programs,” said Kingston Reif of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “I am very concerned.”

Using the same 2013 benchmark, the biggest domestic winner, perhaps, is Head Start.

The bill provides $8.6 billion, $1 billion more than current funding and $612 million higher than what was appropriated last spring. The increase reflects the pressure from Obama himself to invest more in pre-kindergarten education. Much as lawmakers resisted starting a whole new program, the added funding is expected to allow the enrollment of as many as 90,000 more children.

Elsewhere the Army Corps of Engineers is promised $5.467 billion or $495 million more than last spring. New money is added for fisheries disaster assistance and the GOES-R weather satellite in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And after two wars, lawmakers continue to pump billions into the Department of Veterans Affairs, which will receive $2.3 billion more than in 2013.

Whether an agency is a winner or loser in this context, it’s clear that total domestic appropriations are down since the Bush presidency when measured in real dollars adjusted for inflation.

Moreover, the same spending caps set in December will not change significantly in 2015. From this standpoint, the bill now defines a new realism of what Obama faces for the remainder of his own administration.

The comparison with the December 2007 omnibus is telling of the president’s situation.

Discretionary spending six years ago for the title covering the Departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services totaled $144.8 billion — or roughly $162 billion in current dollars. The comparable section of the omnibus now provides $156.8 — leaving Obama with $5 billion less in discretionary funds. In the case of the chapter funding transportation and housing programs — two areas for which he has talked of infrastructure investments — the same type of comparisons show a drop of about $4 billion.